Madison Burgess
A millionaire CEO has revealed why she controversially fired two of her employees as soon as she found out they were cheating on their partners.
For Natalie Dawson, what happens outside the office is just as important to her as what's going on inside, as she explained during Steven Bartlett's Diary of a CEO podcast this week.
Workplace romances are more common than you'd think, with a whopping 85 percent of affairs beginning in this environment... and we won't even talk about that Coldplay jumbotron incident.
But would someone's relationship drama really be enough of a reason to fire them? For Dawson, the answer is an easy one.
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For those not familiar, she's the co-founder and president of two 9-figure businesses: Cardon Ventures and 10X Health.
Cardone Ventures an American business management company, which is valued at over $200 million, that helps entrepreneurs and business owners with financial goals and growth, while the latter is a health and wellness brand.
Bartlett welcomed her onto his famous business podcast this week, where she left him shocked with the wild story.
Telling the story, Dawson recalled: "One of the things I've gotten so much criticism of online was when I publicly shared a TikTok about firing somebody because I found out that she was cheating on her significant other and the other person also had a significant other."
She brutally added: "As soon as I found out about it, I terminated both of them immediately."
Dawson explained: "I can't have this in my environment, especially someone close around me. People trust me and should trust any leader to help them make their success easy.
"Am I making people's success easy by putting them inside that environment? People who are going to erode the values of the group. No.
"Success for most people isn't getting a divorce from their significant other. Success for most people looks like figuring out how to have the success in their professional lives and financial lives while also being able to have a spouse."
She added that she personally wouldn't want her own husband working in a company where 'the environment was just fine with people cheating on each other, lying to each other, and not having a code of ethics'.
Slightly taken aback, Barlett argued that some people would say none of her business what the employees get up to in their spare time, but Dawson simply doubled down.
She said: "It is my business because it was with each other. If they're gonna cheat on the person they're supposed to spend the rest of their life with, do you think they're cheating on their work? Do you think that they're going to cheat on our clients?
"Do you think they're going to have the ethics and morals and judgement to not be so distracted with their own personal ethics situation that they can actually focus and do a good job? That person in any environment is a liability to the environment."
Well, at least everyone else at the company now knows exactly what not to do.